Every Child Is A Scientist

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Every Child Is A Scientist

Editor's Note: Portions of this story in italics below were found to come from BPS Research.

Pablo Picasso once declared: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” Well, something similar can be said about scientists. According to a new study in Cognition led by Claire Cook at MIT, every child is a natural scientist. The problem is how to remain a scientist once we grow up.

The psychologists conducted their experiments on four and five-year-olds, so they had to be pretty simple. Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music when beads were placed on it. Half of the children saw a version of the toy in which the toy was only activated after four beads were exactingly placed, one at a time, on the top of the toy. This was the "unambiguous condition," since it implied every bead is equally capable of activating the device. However, other children were randomly assigned to an "ambiguous condition," in which only two of the four beads activated the toy. (The other two beads did nothing.) In both conditions, the researchers ended their demo with a question: "Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?"

Next came the exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads. One of the pairs was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.

Here's where the ambiguity made all the difference. Children who'd seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair. As a result, they were unable to figure out which beads activated the toy. (In fact, just one out of twenty children in that condition bothered performing the so-called "experiment".) By contrast, nearly fifty percent of children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the beads and attempted to learn which specific beads were capable of activating the toy. The uncertainty inspired their empiricism.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time the children were only given a single bead pair that was permanently fixed. This toy was trickier to activate, since it required that the kids place the pair of beads so that one bead was one top and one bead was dangling over the edge. Once again, children first presented with ambiguous evidence were five times more likely to perform this original "experiment" and thus activate the toy.

The lesson of the research is that even little kids react to ambiguity in a systematic and specific fashion. Their mode of playing is really a form of learning, a way of figuring out how the world works. While kids in the unambiguous condition engaged in just as much play as kids in the ambiguous condition, their play was just play. It wasn't designed to decipher the causal mechanisms of the toy.

"Much as science goes beyond simple experiments, so too does exploratory play," the researchers write. "Exploratory play is a complex phenomenon, presumably subserving a range of functions other than the generating informative evidence...However, to the extent that children acquire causal knowledge through exploration, the current results begin to bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and child's play."

So if kids are natural scientists, then how can we encourage their empirical instincts? And why do children seem to lose this innate curiosity as they grow older? After all, the very same toddlers who experiment with ease on their toys end up detesting chemistry class in high school. Although the world is still full of mystery, we stop investigating it.

One provocative answer to this important set of questions comes from a recent study, "The Double-Edged Sword of Pedagogy," led by Laura Schulz, an MIT psychologist who was also senior author on the box-bead experiment. This research consisted of giving 4-year-olds a new toy outfitted with four tubes. What made the toy interesting is that each tube did something different. One tube, for instance, generated a squeaking sound, while another tube turned into a tiny mirror.

The first group of students was shown the toy by a scientist who declared that she’d just found it on the floor. Then, as she revealed the toy to the kids, she “accidentally” pulled one of the tubes and made it squeak. Her response was sheer surprise: “Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that again!” The second group, in contrast, got a very different presentation. Instead of feigning surprise, the scientist acted like a typical teacher. She told the students that she’d gotten a new toy and that she wanted to show them how it worked. Then, she deliberately made the toy squeak.

After the demonstration, both groups of children were given the toy to play with. Not surprisingly, all of the children pulled on the first tube and laughed at the squeak. But then something interesting happened: While the children from the second group quickly got bored with the toy, those in the first group kept on playing with it. Instead of being satisfied with the squeaks, they explored the other tubes and discovered all sorts of hidden surprises. According to the psychologists, the different reactions were caused by the act of instruction. When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.

The moral is that parents and teachers must navigate the fine line between giving kids a taste of knowledge - the universe is not all mystery - while at the same time preserving a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. When we explain things to kids, we shouldn't pretend that we have all the answers. We shouldn't turn science class into a dry recitation of facts that must be memorized, or only conduct experiments in the classroom in which the results are known in advance. Because it's the not knowing - that tang of doubt and possibility - that keeps us playing with the world, eager to figure out how it works.